TTC Fare Hike

It's sad that the TTC has been forced to raise fares once again to deal with budget shortfalls. Is transit an essential service? I think so. Without the TTC, the streets would be gridlocked, the air polluted, and we wouldn't be able to move goods and services through the City.

What's wrong with cars? Aside from the pollution and global warming it causes, the thousands killed or injured each year, and the stressed, aggressive behaviour it breeds, cars have systematically destroyed our villages, towns, cities, and countrysides. Cars have led to the creation of endless roads, flyovers, shopping malls, gas stations, fast food joints, and parking lots, all where nature was before. Fuel-efficient or non-polluting cars would not have done any better. - Carbusters.org

"The automobile has not merely taken over the street, it has dissolved the living tissue of the city. Its appetite for space is absolutely insatiable; moving and parked, it devours urban land, leaving the buildings as mere islands of habitable space in a sea of dangerous and ugly traffic" - James Marston Fitch

"and yet the relationship between urban dynamism and transit is more fundamental than ever in an age of global warming. Cities that can't move citizens from A to B quickly and efficiently are on the slow road to nowhere.

Though we all know this, the political will to deal with it head-on doesn't exist. We persist in the attitude that public transit is for those who can't afford to drive, the rest of us needn't worry.

The truth is that we can't afford NOT to drive."

-Christopher Hume, Toronto Star

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